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Packed Full of Fantasy Goodness: The Deluxe Tunnels and Trolls RPG

Packed Full of Fantasy Goodness: The Deluxe Tunnels and Trolls RPG

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Deluxe Tunnels and Trolls-smallBack in 1980, on my last day of my first year at secondary school in the UK, an 11-year old me saw a kid with a copy of the paperback Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook. I’d discovered Tolkien a year or two earlier, and, leafing through the book, the pictures of dragons and swords and — most particularly — the dungeon map and diagram of the Planes of Existence at the back both enchanted and fascinated me. But as an 11-year-old I hadn’t much pocket money, and on the first day of my summer holidays and clutching a single sheet pricelist catalog from Games of Liverpool, I spent £1.75 on the only thing I could afford which looked even remotely similar — a slim booklet called Buffalo Castle.

I had no idea what I was doing. When the booklet turned up at my house a few days later I realized it wasn’t even a complete game, but part of another game called Tunnels & Trolls — something called a “solo adventure.” Undaunted, I made up my own rules, played the hell out of Buffalo Castle, and made up several solo adventures of my own — and saved my pocket money for the rule book for Tunnels & Trolls.

Completely accidentally, I’d stumbled onto a path which would shape my whole life.

Fast forward 35 years (and try to say “35” quickly so you don’t feel it…). A couple of months ago I bought the newest and greatest ever edition of the Tunnels & Trolls roleplaying game, funded by Kickstarter over the past couple of years and only now hitting games stores and general release. Designed and written by Ken St. Andre, Liz Danforth, and James “Bear” Peters, and dubbed Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls, it’s effectively the 8th edition of the rules — but unlike many other RPGs, even this 8th edition isn’t too far removed from earlier editions, and if (like me) you grew up on the 5th edition rules, you won’t find yourself in too foreign territory. It’s very much the same game — just better.

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A Biography Worthy of the Creator of D&D: Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination

A Biography Worthy of the Creator of D&D: Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination

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Empire of the Imagination-small Empire of the Imagination back-small

Anyone who has grown up in a small town knows how much of an unrelenting pest, nay enemy, boredom can be. And if you grew up in the days before the internet, or before fairly inexpensive computers or game systems, and when cable television was just getting going, boredom was even more of a specter. However, my young friends and I had one constant respite from boredom: role-playing games (RPGs)! And like most from my generation, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) was our starting point.

It’s hard to communicate just how new and different D&D was from other games that had previously been around. Before RPGs, most games were known for having a point or area of physical attention, e.g. a game-board with pieces, or playing cards. And most of these games had a “winner.” D&D had none of this. You had your player character (PC) sheet, pencil, dice, and graph paper to make a map. And though one’s PC could survive with treasure in a D&D adventure, there weren’t really any “winners,” meaning the game could go on and on and on… sometimes for days or weeks.

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Ares Magazine #2 Now Available

Ares Magazine #2 Now Available

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Ares Magazine 2-smallThe legendary magazine Ares, published by SPI between 1980 and 1984, included a complete SF or fantasy game in every issue. It lasted only 19 issues, but in that time it produced several much-loved games, including Greg Costikyan’s popular Barbarian Kings, an adaptation of Poul Anderson’s 1960 novel The High Crusade, the proto-RPG Citadel of Blood, the under appreciated classic Star Trader, and many others.

Last year Matthew Wuertz reported on the successful attempt to resurrect Ares Magazine by One Small Step Games through a Kickstarter. The first issue of the new version came out last year, with the complete two-player game War of the Worlds, and a nice mix of intriguing articles and fiction. I checked the website recently and discovered the second issue is now available as well, packed with original fiction, articles, and of course a brand new game, Invasive Species. Here’s a peek at the complete contents:

Features

The science behind the construction and utility of space elevators, and why they are so much better than space escalators.
Interview with Dino Andrade, professional voice actor and driving force behind SoulGeek.com
Invasive Species, a two-player boardgame

Invasive Species pits the human crew of a small scout space ship, the CFS Quicksilver, against an alien apex predator trapped on board.

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Taming the Massive Beast of Pathfinder: An Interview with F. Wesley Schneider

Taming the Massive Beast of Pathfinder: An Interview with F. Wesley Schneider

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Pathfinder Tales Bloodbound-smallF. Wesley Schneider has had a fascinating career. He was the former assistant editor of Dragon magazine, and co-authored Complete Scoundrel for Dungeons & Dragons. He is the co-creator of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, and over the last seven years has produced dozens of Pathfinder adventures and accessories, including Hell Unleashed, Artifacts and Legends, Varisia, and Rule of Fear.

He’s currently the editor-in-chief at Paizo, and in that capacity has overseen the entire line of Pathfinder Tales, including novels by Howard Andrew Jones, Tim Pratt, Dave Gross, and many others. His first novel, Bloodbound, was released this week, and we had the chance to chat with him about this exciting change in his career.

You’ve been writing and designing game supplements and adventures for over a decade. What’s it like to get behind the wheel of a novel instead? How are the challenges similar, and how are they different?


Honestly, after spending so much time working on roleplaying games, writing a novel felt sort of self-indulgent. Working on Bloodbound was far more like the act of playing a roleplaying game than writing an RPG adventure actually is.

For anyone not familiar with roleplaying game adventures, they’re essentially giant outlines that allow a Game Master to tell a particular story without having to do much preparation. An RPG adventure provides the script for a story, descriptions of the settings, and game rules for all the various threats.

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Only War for Christmas: How to Defend Warhammer for Teenage Boys

Only War for Christmas: How to Defend Warhammer for Teenage Boys

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…telling stories, reading books, engaging with craft…

Older relative: “Well I’m not buying him  (nose wrinkle) Warhammer.”

Fellow parent: “Oh God, Warhammer. We’re trying to steer him away from that!”

Another parent: “But it’s sooo expensive.”

It’s the run up to Christmas and people want to know what older and teenage boys want, and — just like with books — the boys, the geeky ones at least, want the wrong things.

Except of course, I think these are right things and I want to yell:

There’s this thing you can get that coaches boys in applied game theory, and keeps them telling stories, reading books, engaging with craft, and gathering with friends away from a screen (sometimes even organising them). It also enables them to talk to older boys and adults as peers, and take their place in a multi-generational community… No, it’s not an educational game. No… it’s not an after school club… It’s… Warhammer!!!

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Lost Stone Cities and Desolate Outposts: Exploring Runebound – The Mists of Zanaga

Lost Stone Cities and Desolate Outposts: Exploring Runebound – The Mists of Zanaga

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Zanaga_BoxI previously wrote about Runebound (2nd Edition), an RPG-like board game from Fantasy Flight. You might want to give it a quick read to get the basics down. I also did a post on The Sands of Al-Kalim expansion. Next up is a look at another of the big box expansions: The Mists of Zanaga.

Mists is another of the ‘big box’ expansions for Runebound. It comes with a board that you lay over most of the original Runebound board, completely changing the terrain.

Runebound is a traditional Middle-Earth type of fantasy world, while The Sands of Al-Kalim was a desert setting. Mists of Zanaga is the classic jungle environment, with lost stone cities and desolate outposts in the wild.

The idea is that some powerful entity known as Tarakhe sleeps deep beneath Zangara. It is a primal force that corrupts the world and drove the lizardmen to abandon their empire and descend into barbarism.

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Kickstarting the Mindjammer Universe: A Far Future Transhuman Utopia?

Kickstarting the Mindjammer Universe: A Far Future Transhuman Utopia?

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Yesterday Mindjammer Press launched a Kickstarter for my far future transhuman science-fiction roleplaying game and fiction setting Mindjammer, to fund a series of RPG supplements and fiction for the game, including sourcebooks, adventures, and even a version for the Traveller rules. It made its initial funding goal this morning in a little less than 24 hours, and John very kindly invited me to Black Gate to speak about the Kickstarter and the Mindjammer setting.

You may know something about Mindjammer already — John O’Neill and Howard Andrew Jones have both written about it before, and I’ve blogged about it here too. It’s set in Earth’s far, far future — approximately 17,000AD — during the Expansionary Era, when a formerly stagnant civilization on Old Earth has reinvented itself as a “New Commonality of Humankind” following the discovery of “planing” — faster-than-light travel. Now, two centuries on, the Commonality is journeying to the stars, rediscovering lost colonies settled from Old Earth by slower-than-light generation and stasis ships millennia before. Cultural conflict is everywhere, between this vibrant, optimistic, yet overwhelmingly strong interstellar civilization, and the disunited, often highly divergent lost colony cultures which are facing “integration” at the Commonality’s hands.

The Commonality considers itself the brightest and greatest civilization of humankind. The Mindscape, a vast interstellar shared consciousness and data storage medium to which all Commonality citizens are linked by neural implant, gifts its citizens with technological telepathy and the awesome powers of technopsi. It also lets them upload their memories, and download the memories of other people — even dead people. Artificial life forms with synthetic personalities based on the memory engrams of dead heroes abound: even the starships are sentient beings, the eponymous “Mindjammers”, faster-than-light vessels which travel between the stars, updating the Mindscape and knitting transhumanity’s interstellar civilization together.

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Of Necromancers & Frog Gods – Part One (The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes)

Of Necromancers & Frog Gods – Part One (The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes)

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NECROMANCER GAMES

OGL and D20

Necro_LogoWhen Wizards of the Coast rolled out the Open Game License for 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons, a plethora of third party companies would produce products, leaving players with a seemingly unlimited number of options available for purchase. A few were great, more were terrible and most were in between.

That period was known as the d20 boom, which inevitably led to a d20 bust and is explained in depth in Shannon Appelcline’s tremendous, four-volume RPG history, Designers and Dragons. If you have any interest in role playing history, you will love those books (they are broken up into decades: The Seventies, Eighties, Nineties and Two Thousands).

Along the way, many new and existing companies entered the official Dungeons and Dragons world. One of the most popular and successful was Necromancer Games, founded by Clark Peterson and Bill Webb. Under a different name, Necromancer’s offspring is a major player in the RPG scene today.

The Open Gaming License (OGL) made the 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons mechanics permanently “open use” and the basis of a System Reference Document (SRD). The OGL was accompanied by the d20 license, which verified that third party products were compatible with 3rd Edition.

The OGL and d20 licenses had distinguishing characteristics and somebody more versed than I in the intricacies should write a post on that whole shebang. Suffice to say here, companies began rolling out d20 products from day one.

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Support the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game Kickstarter

Support the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game Kickstarter

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Dungeon Crawl Classic Fourth Printing-smallThe Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG is one of the most successful OSR (“Old School Renaissance”) games on the market, with a well-designed, modern rules system grounded in the origins of sword & sorcery. Now publisher Goodman Games is going back to press with a fourth printing, and to fund it they’ve announced a Kickstarter. Here’s the basic spiel.

Return to the glory days of fantasy with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. Adventure as 1974 intended you to, with modern rules grounded in the origins of sword & sorcery. Fast play, cryptic secrets, and a mysterious past await you: turn the page…

What if Gygax and Arneson were able to build upon thirty years of game design when they created D&D? What if they were freed to focus on their stated inspirations — rather than creating the RPG building blocks from scratch? What if someone were to attempt just that: to immerse himself in the game’s inspirations and re-envision the output using modern game design principles?

That, in short, is the goal of DCC RPG: to create a modern RPG that reflects D&D’s origin-point concepts with decades-later rules editions. From the company that was publishing old-school modules before the OSR ever existed, DCC RPG is not an old-school clone, but a re-imagining of what D&D could have been, utilizing the game’s primary sources of inspiration.

The goal was a modest $15,000; as of this writing the campaign has surpassed $91,000 in pledges, with 18 days left and absolutely no signs of slowing down. The publishers have added an extravagant number of stretch goals — and the ones that have already cleared include sewn-in satin ribbon bookmarks, a full color dust jacket, two built-in 4-panel judge’s reference panels, reprints of five out-of-print modules, and gilded page edges. It’s not too late to jump on board and get all the stretch goals — and the 480-page hardcover rule book — for just a $40 pledge.

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Dungeons & Dragons Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide

Dungeons & Dragons Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide

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Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide-smallBy the time Forgotten Realms hit bookstore shelves in 1987 I was off to college and long absent from Dungeons & Dragons. I never played 2nd Edition, nor leafed through Unearthed Arcana, and while I saw the books and occasionally glimpsed a Forgotten Realms novel, I never read one. It wasn’t that I thought myself too good for gaming, it was just that I’d moved on to other systems.

It was years before I returned to appreciate the simpler, archetypal approach to character creation and streamlined combat as presented in Castles & Crusades and in true retro-clones like Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord. The idea behind them was that the 3.0 and after D&D engine had become encumbered with all sorts of add-ons that bogged down character creation, combat, and play. Having tried to run some of the newer iterations of the game I found myself in sympathy with that philosophy, because for me the story creation got lost in all the rules.

5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons took a lot of what had come before and re-presented it, with innovation and re-organization and a lot of care. It made all those cumbersome feats and skills and fiddly combat bits optional or streamlined (or jettisoned them), which impressed me. I’m still using other systems, but I like what I’ve seen enough that I’ll probably try running it some time.

All that pre-amble is to say I may be the perfect audience for this new Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, because I’m familiar with Dungeons & Dragons and partial to the new game but know almost nothing about the Forgotten Realms or the Sword Coast that’s one of its regions.

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